Bratton Is Expected to Reshape Police to Rebuild Relationship With Public

The incoming New York police commissioner, William J. Bratton, provided few details on Thursday about his plans for his second stint running the nation’s largest police force, but people familiar with his thinking said there would be significant changes in personnel, priorities and how the department is organized and run.

Speaking at the news conference where Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio announced his appointment, Mr. Bratton said he would conduct an examination of the department’s resources, a process that one person familiar with his thinking said would be part of the kind of broad review that he undertook at the outset of his earlier tenure in 1994.

This review is intended in part to look at the department’s priorities and resources and how they are allocated.

Mr. Bratton’s management style could not be more different from his two-time predecessor, Raymond W. Kelly, who has overseen sharp declines in crime over his 12-year tenure and has won both praise and criticism for the counterterrorism units he built from the ground up after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Kelly has concentrated almost all decision-making power in the 35,000-member department in his own hands. Mr. Bratton, on the other hand has been the quintessential delegator, pushing down authority to precinct commanders and giving more discretion to officers, both in his earlier time in New York and during his leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Mr. Bratton will take over a New York force whose widespread use of stop-and-frisk tactics over the last decade drew the ire of a federal judge, led to a growing dissatisfaction with the Police Department in minority neighborhoods, and in some measure propelled Mr. de Blasio into City Hall.

It was, however, Mr. Bratton who 20 years ago helped change the posture of the New York Police Department from one focused on responding to crimes to one that sought to prevent them, in part through an intense focus on low-level quality-of-life offenses. At the same time, he held commanders accountable for disorder and crime in their precincts. Although he left in 1996, those strategies continued to form the bedrock of the Police Department’s patrol strategy.

One byproduct was a growing number of police stops as officers took a more assertive approach, actively searching out and confronting suspicious behavior. Police commanders began to track the number of police stops as an indicator for how hard officers were working. Over time, the threshold for what passed for suspicious behavior lowered. The number of stops soared, peaking in early 2012.

“What we want to create is an environment where stop-and-frisk as we knew it ends,” Mr. de Blasio said on Thursday, with Mr. Bratton at his side. The mayor-elect added that he meant “the overuse of stop-and-frisk, the unconstitutional use of stop-and-frisk, the targeting of young men of color regardless of whether they’d done anything wrong. That’s going to end.”

At the news conference, Mr. Bratton also provided some broad outlines of his plans and priorities, echoing his new boss’s pledge to “bring police and community back together.”

One of the people familiar with his thinking, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because Mr. Bratton’s plans have not been made final, said one goal of the planned assessment was to determine how to reconfigure the department to rebuild relationships, with the community, with other agencies and with the media.

It seems unlikely that Mr. Bratton will bring the kind of wholesale change that marked his administration of the department in 1994, the first time he took over from Mr. Kelly, who has also been commissioner twice and who will hand over the department to Mr. Bratton in January.

In 1994, he asked for undated resignation letters from more than a dozen of its highest ranking officials and weeks later, he accepted about half of them. The moves were the beginning of a re-engineering process that reconfigured the department, its priorities and its management.

But those who have worked with Mr. Bratton in the past expect his new priorities — which he said at the news conference reflect Mr. de Blasio’s — and his management style will in short order have a significant impact on the department.

“He is a change agent,” said Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a former New York deputy police commissioner of legal matters — under both Mr. Bratton and Mr. Kelly in their first terms — and a member of Mr. de Blasio’s transition team.

“There was significant change and a focus on new priorities” in 1994, he said, adding “I expect he will do some version of that when he takes over now.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2013, on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Bratton Is Expected to Alter Police Policy to Rebuild Connections With Public. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe